The Determinants of National Competitiveness

Abstract:
We define foundational competitiveness as the expected level of output per working-age individual that is supported by the overall quality of a country as a place to do business. The focus on output per potential worker, a broader measure of national productivity than output per current worker, reflects the dual role of workforce participation and output per worker in determining a nation's standard of living. Our framework highlights three broad and interrelated drivers of foundational competitiveness: social infrastructure and political institutions, monetary and fiscal policy, and the microeconomic environment. We estimate this framework using multiple data sets covering more than 130 countries over the 2001-2008 period. We find a positive and separate influence of each driver on output per potential worker. The microeconomic environment has a positive effect on output per potential worker even after controlling for historical legacies. Using our framework we define a new concept, global investment attractiveness, which is the cost of factor inputs relative to a country's competitiveness. This analysis reveals important insight into the economic trajectory of individual countries. Our framework also offers a novel methodology for the estimation of a theoretically grounded and empirically validated measure of national competitiveness.